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THE FOUNDATION 




OF 




THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 




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DELIVERED BEFORE 




THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 




JUNE 12, 1860. 








GOLD WIN SMITH, M.A., 

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY. 








##f0rir # §jnib0rt: 
J. H. and Jas. PARKER. 
1861. 



\ 



4 



A LECTURE, &c. 



OLONY is an ambiguous word : the Phoenician 



colonies were factories ; the Roman colonies were 
garrisons ; the Spanish colonies were gold mines, 
worked by slaves ; France justly placed the products 
of her Algerian colony in our Exhibition under the 
heading " Ministry of War." The Greek cities, in 
the hour of their greatness, founded new cities the 
counterparts of themselves. England has had the 
honour, an honour which no disaster can now rend 
from her, of becoming the parent of new nations. To 
colonize in this the highest sense is the attribute of 
freedom. Freedom only can give the necessary self- 
reliance. In freedom only can the habit of self-govern- 
ment requisite for a young community be formed. 
The life of the plant must be diffused through all its 
parts, or its cuttings will not grow. 

It is evidently a law of Providence that man shall 
spread over the earth, make it fruitful, fill it with 
moral being. When all its powers are brought into 
play, when it has a civilized nation on every shore, 
when the instrument is, as it were, fully strung, we 
know not what harmony may result. The great mi- 
grations of mankind are the great epochs of history. 
In the East, the succession of empires has been formed 
by the successive descents of warlike tribes on the 
plains of Mesopotamia, on the countries bordering the 
Persian gulf, on Hindostan and China. In the West, 




b 2 



4 



the evidence which tends to prove that the Greek and 
Roman aristocracies were conquering races, tends also 
to prove that Greece and Rome were the offspring of 
migrations. The migration of the German tribes into 
the Roman empire divides ancient from modern, hea- 
then from Christian, history. So far the propelling 
cause was the want of fresh pastures, or at highest, 
the restlessness of conscious strength, the sight of ill- 
defended wealth, the allurements of sunnier lands. 
The American colonies are the offspring of humanity 
at a more advanced stage and in a nobler mood. They 
arose from discontent, not with exhausted pastures, 
but with institutions that were waxing old, and a 
faith that was ceasing to be divine. They are monu- 
ments of that vast and various movement of humanity, 
the significance of which is but half expressed by the 
name of the Reformation. They are still receiving 
recruits from a movement which is now going on 
similar to the movement of the sixteenth century, 
and perhaps not less momentous, though, as we are 
still in the midst of it, not so clearly understood. The 
enterprises of the Puritans, like their worship, seemed 
to our forefathers eccentricities, disturbing for a mo- 
ment the eternal order of society and the Church ; 
but that which in the eyes of man is eccentricity, 
is sometimes in the course of Providence the central 
power. 

Before the actual commencement of the Reforma- 
tion European society began to feel those blind mo- 
tions of the blood which told that the world's year 
had turned, and that the middle ages .were drawing 
to their close. A general restlessness shewed itself, 
among other ways, in maritime adventure. The Co- 
lumbus of England was John Cabot, borrowed, like 



5 



the Columbus of Spain, from a nation which, crushed 
at home, put forth its greatness in other lands. At 
the close of the fifteenth century John Cabot, with 
his more famous son Sebastian, sailed from Bristol, the 
queen, and now, with its quaint streets and beautiful 
church, the monument, of English commerce, as Eng- 
lish commerce was in its more romantic and perhaps 
its nobler hour. The adventurers put forth, graciously- 
authorized by King Henry VII. to discover a new 
world at their own risk and charge, and to hold it as 
vassals of his crown, landing always at his port of 
Bristol, and paying him one-fifth of the gains for ever. 
This royal grant of the earth to man, like the similar 
grants made by the Papacy, may provoke a smile, but 
it was the same delusion which in after times cost 
tears and blood. The reward of the Cabots was the 
discovery of North America ; and Sebastian, in his 
second voyage, saw the sun of the Arctic summer 
night shine upon the icebergs of the pole. The great 
Elizabethan mariners took up the tale. They had two 
aims, — gold, and the north-west passage to the trea- 
sures of the East. Without chart or guide, with only, 
to use their own phrase, a " merrie wind," they went 
forth on voyages which might have appalled a Frank- 
lin, as free and fearless as a child at play. Frobisher 
sailed north of Hudson's Strait in a bark of twenty- 
five tons. As he dropped down the Thames, Elizabeth 
graciously waved her hand to an enterprise for which 
she had done nothing ; a great art, and one which has 
something to give the Queen her pedestal in history. 
Gilbert, with a little fleet of boats rather than ships, 
took possession for England of Newfoundland. As he 
was on his way homeward, off Cape Breton, in a wild 
night, the lights of his little vessel disappeared. The 



6 



last words he had been heard to say were, " Heaven 
is as near by sea as it is by land." 

Gold lured these adventurers to discover countries, 
as it lured the alchemist to found a science. In their 
thirst for gold they filled their ships with yellow earth. 
Had that yellow earth really been the precious metal, 
it would have made the finders richer only for an 
hour, and brought confusion upon commerce and the 
whole estate of man. The treasures of the precious 
metals seem to be so laid that new stores may be 
found only when the circle of trade is greatly enlarged, 
and the wealth of mankind greatly increased. And if 
the precious metals are the only or the best circu- 
lating medium, and it is necessary that the balance 
between them and the sum of human wealth should 
be preserved, this may perhaps be reckoned among 
the proofs that the earth is adapted to the use of man. 

England had a keen race for North America with 
Spain and France. The name of Espiritu Santo Bay 
on the coast of Florida commemorates the presence of 
those devout adventurers who marched with a train 
of priests, with all the paraphernalia of the mass, with 
bloodhounds to hunt the natives and chains to bind 
them. Spanish keels first floated on the imperial 
waters and among the primeval forests of the Missis- 
sippi. The name of Carolina, a settlement planned 
by Coligny, is a monument fixed by the irony of fate 
to the treacherous friendship of Charles IX. with the 
Huguenots on the eve of the St. Bartholomew. North 
America would have been ill lost to the Spaniard ; it 
would not have been so ill lost to the Huguenot. 

But the prize was to be ours. After roaming for 
a century from Florida to Greenland, English enter- 
prize furled its wandering sail upon a shore which to 



7 



its first explorers seemed a paradise, and called the land 
Virginia, after the Virgin Queen. Raleigh was deep 
in this venture, as his erratic spirit was deep in all 
the ventures, commercial, political, military, and lite- 
rary, of that stirring and prolific time. So far as 
his own fortunes were concerned, this scheme, like 
most of his other schemes, was a brilliant failure. 
In after times North Carolina called her capital by 
his name — 

" Et nunc servat honor sedem tuus, ossaque nomen 
Hesperia in magna, siqua est ea gloria, signat," — 

if that can appease the injured, unhappy, and heroic 
shade. 

Virginia had seemed an earthly paradise. But on 
reading intently the annals of colonization, we soon 
discover how hard it is for man to fix his dwelling 
where his fellow has never been ; how he sinks and 
perishes before the face, grand and lovely though 
it be, of colossal, unreclaimed trackless nature. The 
Virginian colonists had among them too many broken 
gentlemen, tradesmen, and serving-men, too few who 
were good hands at the axe and spade. They had 
come to a land of promise in expectation of great and 
speedy gains, and it seems clear that great and speedy 
gains are not to be made by felling primeval woods. 
That the enterprize was not abandoned was due in 
a great measure to the cheering presence of a wild 
adventurer, named Captain John Smith, who, turned 
by his kind relations as a boy upon a stirring world, 
with ten shillings in his pocket, and that out of his 
own estate, had, before he was thirty, a tale to tell of 
wars in the Low Countries and against the Turks, of 
battles and single combats, of captivities, of wander- 
ings and voyages in all quarters of the globe, as strange 



8 



and moving as the tale of Othello ; and who, if he did 
not win a Desdemona, won a Turkish princess to save 
him from the bowstring at Adrianople, and an Indian 
princess to save him from the tomahawk in Virginia. 
Again and again the settlement was recruited and re- 
supplied. The original colony of Raleigh quite died 
out ; and upon the place of its transient abode nature 
resumed her immemorial reign. The settlement was 
made good under James I., and at last prospered by 
the cultivation of tobacco ; so that the royal author of 
the " Counterblast" unwillingly became the patron of 
the staple he most abhorred. Even this second colony 
once re-embarked in despair, and was turned back 
by the long-boat of the vessel which brought it re- 
inforcements and supplies. 

To mankind the success of the Virginian colony 
proved but a doubtful boon. The tobacco was culti- 
vated first by convicts, then by negro slaves. The 
Dutch brought the first cargo of negroes to the colony ; 
but the guilt of this detested traffic does not rest 
in any especial manner on the Dutch : the whole of 
commercial Europe was tainted with the sin. Sir John 
Hawkins, Elizabeth's gallant admiral, was a slaver, 
and the Crown itself was not ashamed to share his. 
gains. The cities of Spain were seats of the slave 
trade, as well as of religious persecutions ; and both 
these deadly diseases of humanity had been stimu- 
lated by the Crusades. Even the Puritans of New 
England were preserved from the contagion rather 
by their energetic industry as free labourers, and the 
nobility of their character, than by clear views of 
right. They denounced kidnapping ; they forbad 
slavery to be perpetual ; but bondage in itself seemed 
to them lawful because it was Jewish. It is an addi- 



9 

tional reason for dealing carefully with the subject of 
Jewish history and the Jewish law, when we see them 
wrested as they are to the defence of slavery, with all 
its abysses of cruelty and lust. To put the case as 
low as possible, Can those who support slavery by 
Jewish precedents say that the Jews for whom Moses 
legislated possessed that definite conviction of the im- 
mortality of the soul, that clear conception of the 
spiritual life and of the spiritual relations of man to 
man, on which the loathsomeness of slave-owning in 
a Christian's eyes principally depends ? Nor, again, 
must slave-owners fancy they are counterparts of Eng- 
lish gentlemen. It has been remarked that English 
gentlemen, when owners of West Indian property, 
shrank with a half-honourable inconsistency from 
living on their estates and plying the trade of the 
slave-owner, though they did not shrink from taking 
the slave-owner's gains. To continue a slave- owner 
the American must be false, not only to Christianity, 
but to all that is proud and high in the great race 
from which he springs. The growth of trade has 
necessarily rendered the system more mercenary, cold- 
blooded, and vile. It was milder and more patriarchal 
in the hands of the Virginian gentleman of earlier 
days. Washington himself was a Virginian slave- 
owner, the best of slave-owners, and therefore a strong 
though temperate advocate for the immediate abolition 
of the slave trade, and the progressive emancipation 
of the slaves. Jefferson, the first President of the 
party which now upholds slavery, and, like Washing- 
ton, a Virginian proprietor, also spoke strong words, 
uttered terrible warnings, though political passion 
made him partly faithless to the cause. England 
indeed owes the American slave-owner charity and 

b 3 



10 



patience, for she was the full accomplice, if she was not 
the author of his guilt. In the treaty of Utrecht we 
bargained with Spain for a share in the negro trade ; 
and Queen Anne mentioned this article in her speech 
to Parliament as one of the trophies of a war under- 
taken to save the liberties of Europe. It is true the 
spirit of William surviving in his councillors made 
the war, the spirit of Bolingbroke made the peace. 
But long after the peace of Utrecht, down to the very- 
eve of our rupture with the American colonies, we 
encouraged, we enforced the trade, and in our West 
Indian slave colonies we kept up the focus of the pes- 
tilence. Still we have purged ourselves of the stain. 
The American slave states were in their own hands, 
they were fresh in the enjoyment of their own liber- 
ties, the declaration of the Rights of Man was on 
their lips, the case was not desperate, the cause was 
earnestly pleaded before them, when they in effect 
determined that they would let slavery be as it had 
been. Then their good angel left their side. 

There is in America another race, less injured than 
the negro, but scarcely less unhappy. The first Eng- 
lish explorers of Virginia brought word that they 
had " been entertained by the Indians with all love 
and kindness, and with as much bounty, after their 
manner, as they could possibly devise ; and that 
they found them a people most gentle, loving, and 
faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as 
lived after the manner of the golden age." These 
loving entertainments and this golden age were soon 
followed by an iron age of suspicion, hatred, encroach- 
ment, border warfare, treacherous and murderous on- 
falls of the weaker on the stronger, bloody vengeance 
of the stronger on the weaker. And now it seems 



11 



there will soon be nothing left of the disinherited race 
but the strange music of its names mingling with the 
familiar names of England in the hills and rivers 
of its ancient heritage. Yet its blood is not on the 
heads of those who dwell in its room. They, indeed, 
have turned the wilderness over which it wandered 
into the cities and corn-fields of a great nation ; and 
in so doing they have obeyed the law of Providence, 
which has given the earth, not for the dominion, but 
for the support of man. They conjured the phantom 
of the Indian hunter's proprietary right by the forms 
of treaty and purchase. They did not seek to exter- 
minate, they did not seek to enslave; they did seek 
to civilize and convert. Protestantism in its noblest 
and purest form, and the better spirit of Jesuitism, 
— the spirit, that is, of Xavier and not of Loyola, — 
vied with each other in doing all that religion could 
do to elevate and save. The marriage of an Indian 
princess with an Englishman was hailed as an auspici- 
ous pledge of the union of the two races under one 
name and with one God. But the fate of savages 
brought abruptly into contest with civilization has 
everywhere been the same. Never, says an eminent 
writer, have they been reclaimed except by religion. 
It is the exception that is doubtful. Where are 
the reclaimed, or rather the domesticated, savages of 
Paraguay, whose dwindling numbers, even under the 
Jesuit rule, were kept up by decoying recruits from 
neighbouring tribes ? What do we hear as to the 
probable fate of the reclaimed savages of New Zea- 
land ? It seems as though to pass at a bound from 
the lowest step in the scale to the highest were not 
given to man ; as though to attempt it, even with the 
best aid, were to die. Mere savages the Indians seem 

b 4 



12 



to have been, though America has filled the void of 
romance in her history with their transfigured image. 
They knew the simpler arts of life ; they had great 
acuteness of sense, and fortitude equalled only by 
their cruelty; but they lived and died creatures of 
the hour, caring not for the past or for the future, 
keeping no record of their forefathers, not storing 
thought, without laws and government but those of 
a herd, using the imagery of sense, their seeming 
eloquence, only because they lacked the language of 
the mind, having no religion but a vague awe, which 
fixed on everything terrible or marvellous as a god. 
Yet they did not exist in vain. Without their pre- 
sence, their aid, slight as it was, their guidance, the 
heart of the wanderer would perhaps have utterly sunk 
in that vast solitude, then a world away from home 
and succour. The animal perfection of their lower 
nature enabled them to struggle with and thread the 
wilderness, the horrors of which their want of the 
finer nature made them all the more fit to bear. 
They were the pioneers of a higher state of things ; 
and perhaps we, heirs as we seem to ourselves of all 
the ages, may to the late heirs of our age seem 
no more. 

Virginia then went prosperously, as it was thought, 
upon her course, the destined centre and head of the 
slave states. Her own society and that of the adjoin- 
ing states, which took their colour from her, was old 
English society, as far as might be, in a new land. 
The royal governors were little kings. There was no 
aristocracy as in England, but there was a landed 
gentry with aristocratic pride. There was, down to 
the Revolution, the English rule of primogeniture 
in the succession to land. Tbe Church of England 



13 



was the Church of the colony, half established, and a 
little inclined to intolerance. In Virginia many of the 
Cavaliers took refuge in their evil hour. In Virginia 
Charles II. reigned while he was proscribed in England. 
In Virginia a royal governor could say, as late as 
1671, "I thank God there are no free schools nor 
printing, and I hope we shall not have them these 
hundred years ; for learning has brought disobedience 
and misery and sects into the world, and printing has 
divulged them, and libels against the best government. 
God keep us from both." 

Meantime, far north, where the eastern mountains 
of America press the sea, in a bracing climate, on 
a soil which demands free labour, another colony had 
been formed, of other materials, and with a different 
aim. Of a poor Puritan teacher, more truly than of 
the royal restorer of Virginia, might it have been 
prophesied, — 

" Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, 
His honour and the greatness of his name 
Shall be, and make new nations." 

When the Presbyterian James mounted the throne, 
the persecuted Puritans thought a better day had 
dawned. They were quickly undeceived. The saga- 
cious eye of the royal Solomon at once discerned how 
much the throne would be strengthened and secured 
by that compact alliance with a party in the Church, 
which soon laid Church and Throne together in the 
dust. At the Hampton Court Conference he revealed 
at once his purpose and his nature by speaking foul, 
unkingly words to the honoured leaders of that great 
party whose heroic energy, shining forth in famous 
soldiers and famous statesmen, had saved England 
and the English crown from Spain. Under the vigil- 



14 



ant eye and zealous hand of Bancroft the persecution 
grew hotter and more searching than before. The 
tale that follows has been often told. A Puritan 
congregation on the confines of Yorkshire, Lincoln- 
shire, and Nottinghamshire, whose teacher's name 
was Robinson, harassed beyond endurance, resolved 
to leave all they had and fly to Holland, there to 
worship God in peace. They accordingly attempted 
to escape, were arrested, set free again ; again they 
attempted to escape, were pursued by the agents of 
persecution to the shore, and part of them seized, 
but again with difficulty let go. In Holland the con- 
gregation dwelt twelve years, devout, industrious, 
blameless, no man, said the Dutch magistrates, bring- 
ing suit or accusation against them ; the living image 
of that for which we gaze into the darkness of the 
first two centuries in vain. But the struggle for 
bread was hard. The children grew sickly and bent 
with toil before their time. There was war in Ger- 
many. The cities of the Low Countries were full of 
loose and roving soldiery, and Holland itself was torn 
by the bloody struggle between the Arminians and 
the Gomarists. Some of the younger members of 
the congregation fell into evil courses, enlisted, went 
to sea. Then with prayer and fasting the congre- 
gation turned their thoughts to the New World. The 
Dutch, learning their intention, bid high for them, 
knowing well the value of such settlers. But that 
which they did they would do as Englishmen, and 
for the honour of their own land. They made their 
suit through friends in England to the King and the 
Virginia Company ; spoke dutifully of the royal au- 
thority, meekly of the authority of bishops ; repre- 
sented that, though the enterprise was dangerous, — and 



15 



to peasants like them it was dangerous indeed, — though 
the honour of it might be bought with life, yet in their 
case, no common one, it would be rightly undertaken, 
and they were not unfit to undertake it. " We are 
well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother 
country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange 
land. The people are industrious and frugal. We 
are knit together in a most sacred covenant of the 
Lord, of the violation whereof we make great con- 
science, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves 
strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of 
the whole. It is not with us as with men whom 
small things can discourage." The Virginia Company 
gave hesitating assistance and a worthless patent. 
The King and the Bishops held out fair hopes of 
beneficent neglect/ " Ungrateful Americans !" cried a 
minister in a debate on the Stamp Act. ' ' Planted by our 
care," cried another minister, " nourished up by our 
indulgence, will they grudge to contribute their mite 
to relieve us from the heavy burden we lie under ?" 

Through the solemn sadness of the parting from 
Delft haven shone the glory of great things to come. 
History reveals abysses which, if her evidence were 
all, might make us doubt which power it was that 
ruled the world. But history bears steady witness to 
the lasting ascendancy of moral over physical force. 
All rhetoric apart, those masters of thirty legions, 
who with so much blood and din shift to and fro the 
boundaries of kingdoms, go to dust, and, saving the 
evil they leave behind them, are as though they 
had never been. But these poor peasants, at small 
charge to the Virginia Company, became in a real 
sense the founders of a new world. 

It was not from Delft haven but from Southampton 



16 



that they finally embarked. England deserved that 
honour at their hands, for they went forth, though 
not from the English Government, from the heart of 
the English people. Of their two little vessels the 
" Speedwell" leaked, and was forced to put back, with 
the weaker bodies and fainter spirits in her. The 
" Mayflower" went on her way alone : she went safely 
through storms, carrying greater fortunes than those 
of Csesar. On Saturday the 11th of November, 1620, 
she dropped her anchoi on a wintry coast ; and next 
day the Puritan kept his first Sabbath in his own land. 
He kept that Sabbath sacred in his extremity ; and 
amidst the keen race for wealth his descendants keep 
it sacred still. The welcome of the Puritans to their 
home was the wilderness in all its horrors, chequered 
by a few signs of Indian life, and soon by a volley of 
Indian arrows ; snow, frost that made the wet clothes 
of the explorers stiff as iron ; hunger that drove them 
to feed on shell-fish ; deadly fever and consumption. 
More than half the number died : the survivors had 
scarce strength to bury the dead by the sea and con- 
ceal the graves, lest the Indians might perceive how 
the colony was weakened. The mortal straggle lasted 
for two years. Yet this colony did not, like Virginia, 
require to be re-founded, not even to be re-victualled. 
"It is not with us as with men whom small things 
can discourage." The third summer brought a good 
harvest, and the victory was won. " Let it not be 
grievous to you," said the Puritans in England, — 
" let it not be grievous to you that you have been 
instruments to break the ice for others. The honour 
shall be yours to the world's end." 

Before the pilgrims landed, they by a solemn in- 
strument founded the Puritan republic. The tone of 



17 



this instrument and the success of its authors may 
afford a lesson to revolutionists who sever the present 
from the past with the guillotine, fling the illustrious 
dead out of their tombs, and begin history again with 
the year one. These men had been wronged as much 
as the Jacobins. 

" Tn the name of God. Amen. We whose names 
are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread 
Sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God 
of Great Britain and Ireland, defender of the faith, 
&c, having undertaken, for the glory of God and ad- 
vancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our 
king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony 
in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents 
solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and 
of one another, covenant and combine ourselves toge- 
ther into a civil body politic for our better ordering 
and preservation, and for the furtherance of the ends 
aforesaid ; and by virtue hereof to exact, constitute, 
and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances and 
acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as 
shall be thought most meet for the general good of 
the colony, unto which we promise all due submission 
and obedience." And then follows the roll of plebeian 
names, to which the Roll of Battle Abbey is a poor 
record of nobility. 

There are points in history at which the spirit 
which moves the whole shews itself more clearly 
through the outward frame. This is one of them. 
Here we are passing from the feudal age of privilege 
and force, to the age of due submission and obedi- 
ence, to just and equal offices and laws, for our better 
ordering and preservation. In this political covenant 
of the pilgrim fathers lies the American Declaration of 



18 



Independence. From the American Declaration of 
Independence was borrowed the French Declaration 
of the Rights of Man. France, rushing ill-prepared, 
though with overweening confidence, on the great 
problems of the eighteenth century, shattered not her 
own hopes alone ; but nearly at the same moment 
the Puritan Republic, breaking the last slight link 
that bound it to feudal Europe, placed modern society 
firmly and tranquilly on its new foundation. To the 
free States of America we owe our best assurance that 
the oldest, the most famous, the most cherished of 
human institutions are not the life, nor would their 
fall be the death, of social man ; that all which comes 
of Charlemagne, and all which comes of Constantine, 
might go to the tombs of Charlemagne and Constan- 
tine, and yet social duty and affection, religion and 
worship, free obedience to good government, free 
reverence for just laws, continue as before. They 
who have achieved this, have little need to talk of 
Bunker's Hill. 

Not that republicanism in New England is all its 
founders expected it to be. " Our popularity," said 
the framers of the popular constitution of Rhode 
Island, — " our popularity shall not, as some con- 
jecture it will, prove an anarchy, and so a common 
tyranny ; for we are exceedingly desirous to preserve 
every man safe in his person, name, and estate." 
That might be said confidently of a quiet agricul- 
tural community of small proprietors, which could 
not be so confidently said of great trading commu- 
nities with vast and restless cities. But the Puritan 
institutions have had other difficulties to contend 
with, for which fair allowance must be made. The 
stream of English and German, the torrent of Irish 



19 



emigration, relieving other countries of a great danger, 
casts on the Republic a multitude of discontented and 
lawless spirits, far removed from the restraining in- 
fluences of their native land, from the eye of neigh- 
bours, friends, and kinsmen, from the church-bells of 
their home. The incongruous and fatal union of the 
free with the slave States, for which those who drove 
them all to combine against English tyranny are 
partly responsible, has brought upon the constitution 
the tremendous strain of the great Slavery question, 
and led to that deadly alliance between the Southern 
slave-owner and the Northern anarchist which calls 
itself the Democratic party. The rupture with the 
English monarchy gave the States a violent bias to- 
wards democracy, which they were far from exhibit- 
ing before ; and set up the revolutionary doctrine of 
the sovereign people, which tends as much as any 
other despotic doctrine to annul the greatest step in 
the progress of humanity by placing will, though it 
be the will of the many, above reason and the law. 
To crown all, comes the poisonous influence of the 
elective presidency, the great prize of restless and 
profligate ambition ; the fountain of envy, malignity, 
violence, and corruption ; the object of factions other- 
wise as devoid of object and of meaning as INeri and 
Bianchi, Caravat and Shanavest ; in their fierce strug- 
gles for which American statesmen have too often 
shewn, that if public life is the noblest of all call- 
ings it is the vilest of all trades. The Diet of the 
Swiss Confederation, presided over by the first magis- 
trate of the leading canton for the year, would 
have furnished a happier model. The character of 
Washington is one of the glories of our race; but 
was he a man of genius ? Did he see that he had to 



20 



frame a constitution for a confederacy of republics, 
not for a nation? Did not the image of the English 
monarchy, something of the state of which he thought 
it his duty as President to keep, hover too much be- 
fore his eyes ? Yet, as he looked for the progres- 
sive abolition of slavery, he must be acquitted of so 
terrible an error as an attempt to make one nation 
of the slave and free. Happily, political institutions 
kill as seldom as they cure ; and the real current of 
a great nation's life may run calmly beneath the seeth- 
ing and frothy surface which alone meets our eyes. 

With popular government the Puritans established 
popular education. They are the great authors of the 
system of common schools. They founded a college, 
too, and that in dangerous and pinching times. Nor 
did their care fail, nor is it failing, to produce an in- 
telligent people. A great literature is a thing of slow 
growth everywhere. The growth of American lite- 
rature was retarded at first by Puritan severity, which 
forced even philosophy to put on a theological garb, 
and veiled the Necessarianism of Mr. Mill in the Cal- 
vinism of Jonathan Edwards. Now, perhaps, its growth 
is retarded by the sudden burst of commercial activity 
and wealth, the development of which our monopo- 
lies long restrained. One day, perhaps, this wealth 
may be used as nobly as the wealth of Florence ; but 
for some time it will be spent in somewhat coarse 
pleasures by those w T ho have suddenly won it. It is 
spent in somewhat coarse pleasures by those who have 
suddenly won it at Liverpool and Manchester, as well 
as at New York. One praise, at any rate, American 
literature may claim ; it is pure. Here the spirit of 
the pilgrims still holds its own. The public opinion 
of a free country is a restraining as well as a moving 



21 



power. On the other hand, despotism, political or 
ecclesiastical, does not extinguish human liberty. 
That it may take away the liberty of reason, it gives 
the liberty of sense. It says to man, Do what you 
will, sin and shrive yourself ; but eschew political 
improvement, and turn away your thoughts from 
truth. 

The history of the Puritan Church in New England 
is one of enduring glory, of transient shame. Of 
transient shame, because there was a moment of in- 
tolerance and persecution"; of enduring glory, because 
intolerance and persecution instantly gave way to 
perfect liberty of conscience and free allegiance to 
the truth. The founders of New England were Inde- 
pendents. When they went forth, their teacher had 
solemnly charged them to follow him no further than 
they had seen him follow his Master. He had pointed 
to the warning example of Churches which fancied 
that because Calvin and Luther were great and shi- 
ning lights in their times, therefore there could be no 
light vouchsafed to man after theirs. " I beseech 
you remember it ; it is an article of your Church 
covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth 
shall be made known to you from the written word 
of God." It was natural that the Puritan settlement 
should at first be a Church rather than a State. To 
have given a share in its lands or its political franchise 
to those who were not of its communion would have 
been to make the receiver neither rich nor powerful, 
and the giver, as he might well think, poor and weak 
indeed. But the Communion grew into an Establish- 
ment ; and the Puritan Synod, as well as the Coun- 
cil of Trent, must needs forget that it was the child 
of change, and build its barrier, though not a very 



22 



unyielding one, across the river which flows for ever. 
Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, were 
partly secessions from Massachusetts, led by those 
who longed for perfect freedom ; and in fairness to 
Massachusetts it must be said, that among those 
seceders were some in whose eyes freedom herself 
was scarcely free. The darkness of the Middle Ages 
must bear the blame if not a few were dazzled by 
the sudden return of light. The name of Providence, 
the capital of Ehode Island, is the thank-offering of 
Roger Williams, to whose wayward and disputatious 
spirit much may be forgiven if he first clearly pro- 
claimed, and first consistently practised, the perfect 
doctrine of liberty of conscience, the sole guarantee 
for real religion, the sole trustworthy guardian of the 
truth. That four Quakers should have suffered death 
in a colony founded by fugitives from a persecution 
is a stain on the history of the free Churches of Ame- 
rica, like the stain on the robe of Marcus Aurelius, 
like the stain on the escutcheon of the Black Prince. 
It is true there was no inquisition, no searching of 
conscience ; that the persecutors warned their victims 
away, and sought to be quit of them, not to take 
their blood ; that the Quakers thrust themselves on 
their fate in their frenzied desire for martyrdom. All 
this at most renders less deep by one degree the dye 
of religious murder. The weapon was instantly wrested 
from the hand of fanaticism by the humane instinct 
of a free people ; and the blood of those four victims 
sated in the new world the demon who, in the old 
world, between persecutions and religious wars, has 
drunk the blood of millions, and is scarcely sated yet. 
If the robe of religion in the new world was less rich 
than in the old, it was all but pure of those red stains, 



23 



compared with which the stains upon the robe of 
worldly ambition, scarlet though they be, are white as 
w T ool. In the new world there was no Inquisition, no 
St. Bartholomew, no Thirty Years' War : in the new 
world there w 7 as no Voltaire. If we would do Voltaire 
justice, criminal and fatal as his destructive levity w 7 as, 
we have only to read his " Cry of Innocent Blood,' 
and we shall see that the thing he assailed was not 
Christianity, much less God. The American sects, 
indeed, soon added to the number of those variations 
of the Protestant Churches, which, contrasted with the 
majestic unity of Rome, furnished a proud argument 
to Bossuet. Had Bossuet lived to see what came 
forth at the Revolution from under the unity of the 
Church of France, he might have doubted whether 
unity w r as so united ; as, on the other hand, if he 
had seen the practical union of the free Churches of 
America for the weightier matters of religion, which 
De Tocqueville observed, he might have doubted 
whether variation was so various. It would have 
been too much to ask a Bossuet to consider whether, 
looking to the general dealings of Providence with 
man, the variations of free and conscientious inquirers 
are an absolute proof that free and conscientious 
inquiry is not the road to religious truth. 

In Maryland, Roman Catholicism itself, having 
tasted of the cup it had made others drink to the 
dregs, and being driven to the asylum of oppressed 
consciences, proclaimed the principle of toleration. 
In Maryland the Church of Alva and Torquemada 
grew, bloodless and blameless ; and thence it has gone 
forth, as it was in its earlier and more apostolic hour, 
to minister to the now large Roman Catholic popula- 
tion of the United States whatever of good and true, 



24 



in the great schism of humanity, may have remained 
on the worse and falser side. For in Maryland it had 
no overgrown wealth and power to defend against the 
advance of truth. Bigotry, the mildest of all the vices, 
has the worst things laid to her charge. That wind of 
free discipline which, to use Bacon's image, winnows 
the chaff of error from the grain of truth, is in it- 
self welcome to man as the breeze of evening. It is 
when it threatens to winnow away, not the chaff of 
error alone, but princely bishoprics of Strasburg and 
Toledo, that its breath becomes pestilence, and Chris- 
tian love is compelled to torture and burn the in- 
fected sheep, in order to save from infection the 
imperilled flock. 

There have been wild religious sects in America. 
But cannot history shew sects as wild in the old 
world ? Is not Mormonism itself fed by the wild 
apocalyptic visions, and the dreams of a kinder and 
happier social state, which haunt the peasantry in the 
more neglected parts of our own country ? Have not 
the wildest and most fanatical sects in history arisen 
when the upper classes have turned . religion into 
policy, and left the lower classes, who knew nothing 
of policy, to guide or misguide themselves into the 
truth ? 

New England was fast peopled by the flower of the 
Puritan party, and the highest Puritan names were 
blended with its history. Among its elective gover- 
nors was Vane, even then wayward as pure, even then 
suspected of being more Republican than Puritan. It 
saw also the darker presence of Hugh Peters. While 
the day went hard with freedom and the Protestant 
cause in England, the tide set steadily westward ; it 
turned, when the hour of retaliation came, to the great 



25 



Armageddon of Westminster and Naseby ; after the 
Restoration it set to the West again. In New Eng- 
land Puritanism continued to reign with all that was 
solemn, austere, strange in its spirit, manners, lan- 
guage, garb, when in England its dominion, dege- 
nerating into tyranny, had met with a half-merited 
overthrow. In New England three of the judges of 
Charles I. found a safer refuge than Holland could 
afford, and there one of them lived to see the scales 
once more hung out in heaven, the better part of his 
own cause triumphant once more, and William sit on 
the Protector's throne. 

Among the emigrants were clergymen, Oxford and 
Cambridge scholars, high-born men and women, for 
in that moving age the wealthiest often vied with the 
poorest in indifference to worldly interest and devotion 
to a great cause, Even peers of the Puritan party 
thought of becoming citizens of Massachusetts, but 
had enough of the peer in them to desire still to have 
an hereditary seat in the councils of the State. Mas- 
sachusetts answered this demand by the hand of one 
who had himself made a great sacrifice, and without 
republican bluster ; " When God blesseth any branch 
of any noble or generous family with a spirit and gifts 
fit for government, it would be a taking of God's name 
in vain to put such a talent under a bushel, and a sin 
against the honour of magistracy to neglect such in 
our public elections. But if God should not delight 
to furnish some of their posterity with gifts fit for 
magistracy, we should enforce them rather to reproach 
and prejudice than exalt them to honour, if we should 
call those forth whom God doth not to public au- 
thority." The Venetian seems to be the only great 
aristocracy in history the origin of which is not trace- 



26 



able to the accident of conquest ; and the origin even 
of the V enetian aristocracy may perhaps be traced to 
the accident of prior settlement and the contagious 
example of neighbouring states. That which has its 
origin in accident may prove useful and live long ; it 
may even survive itself under another name, as the 
Roman patriciate, as the Norman nobility survived 
themselves under the form of a mixed aristocracy of 
birth, political influence, and wealth. But it can 
flourish only in its native soil. Transplant it, and it 
dies. The native soil of feudal aristocracy is a feudal 
kingdom, with great estates held together by the law 
or custom of primogeniture in succession to land. The 
New England colonies rejected primogeniture with the 
other institutions of the Middle Ages, and adopted 
the anti-feudal custom of equal inheritance, under the 
legal and ancestral name of gavelkind. It was Saxon 
England emerging from the Norman rule. This rule 
of succession to property, and the equality with which 
it is distributed, are the basis of the republican in- 
stitutions of New England. To transfer those insti- 
tutions to countries where that basis does not exist, 
would be almost as absurd as to transfer to modern 
society the Roman laws of the Twelve Tables, or the 
Capitularies of Charlemagne. 

In New York, New Jersey, Delaware, settlements 
formed by the energy of Dutch and Swedish Pro- 
testantism have been absorbed by the greater energy 
of the Anglo-Saxons. The rising empire of his faith 
beyond the Atlantic did not fail to attract the soaring 
imagination of Gustavus ; it was in his thoughts when 
he set out for Liitzen. But the most remarkable of 
the American colonies, after the New England group, 
is Pennsylvania. We are rather surprised, on looking 



27 



at the portrait of the gentle and eccentric founder of 
the Society of Friends, to see a very comely youth, 
dressed in complete armour. Penn was a highly edu- 
cated and accomplished gentleman, heir to a fine 
estate, and to all the happiness and beauty, which he 
was not without a heart to feel, of English manorial 
life. " You are an ingenious gentleman/' said a ma- 
gistrate before whom he was brought for his Quaker 
extravagances, " why do you make yourself unhappy 
by associating with such a simple people?" In the 
old world he could only hope to found a society, in 
the new world he might hope to found a nation, of 
which the law should be love. The constitution he 
framed for Philadelphia, on pure republican principles, 
was to be 4 £ for the support of power in reverence with 
the people, and to secure the people from the abuse 
of power. For liberty without obedience is eonfusion, 
and obedience without liberty is slavery." He ex- 
cluded himself and his heirs from the founder's bane 
of authority over his own creation. It is as a re- 
former of criminal law, perhaps, that he has earned 
his brightest and most enduring fame. The codes and 
customs of feudal Europe were lavish of servile or 
plebeian blood. In the republic of New England the 
life of every man was precious, and the criminal law 
was far more humane than that of Europe, though 
tainted with the dark Judaism of the Puritans, with 
the ceuel delusion which they shared with the rest of 
the world on the subject of witchcraft, and with their 
overstrained severity in punishing crimes of sense. 
Penn confined capital punishment to the crimes of 
treason and murder. Two centuries afterwards, the 
arguments of Romilly and the legislation of Peel con- 
vinced Penn's native country that these reveries of 



28 



his, the dictates of wisdom which sprang from his 
heart, were sober truth. We are now beginning to 
see the reality of another of his dreams, the dream of 
making the prison not a gaol only, but a place of 
reformation. Of the two errors in government, that 
of treating men like angels and that of treating them 
like beasts, he did something to shew that the one to 
which he leaned was the less grave, for Philadelphia 
grew up like an olive-branch beneath his fostering 
hand. 

In the Carolinas, the old settlement of Coligny was 
re-peopled with English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Swiss, 
the motley elements which will blend with Hollander 
and Swede to form in America the most mixed, and 
on one theory the greatest, of all races. The philo- 
sophic hand of Locke attempted to create for this 
colony a highly elaborate constitution, judged at the 
time a masterpiece of political art. His philosophic 
hand might almost as well have attempted to create 
a full-grown tree. Georgia bears the name of the 
second king of that line whose third king was to lose 
all. Its philanthropic founder, Oglethorpe, struggled 
to exclude slavery, but an evil policy and the neigh- 
bourhood of the West Indies baffled his endeavours. 
Here Wesley preached, here Whitfield ; and Whit- 
field, too anxious to avoid offence that he might be 
permitted to save souls, paid a homage to the system 
of slavery and made a sophistical apology for it, which 
weigh heavily against the merits of a great apostle of 
the poor. 

For some time all the colonies, whatever their 
nominal government, whether they were under the 
Crown, under single proprietors, under companies, or 
under free charters, enjoyed, in spite of chronic nego- 



29 



tiation and litigation with the powers in England, 
a large measure of practical independence. James I. 
was weak ; Charles I. and Laud had soon other things 
to think of ; the Long Parliament were disposed to be 
arrogant, but the Protector was magnanimous ; and 
finally, Charles II., careless of everything on this side 
the water, was still more careless of everything on 
that side, and Clarendon was not too stiff for pre- 
rogative to give a liberal charter to a colony of which 
he was himself a patentee. Hoyal governors, indeed, 
sometimes tried to over-act the king, and the folly of 
Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, all but 
forestalled, and well would it have been if it had quite 
forestalled, the folly of Lord North. With this ex- 
ception the colonies rested content and proud beneath 
the shadow of England, and no thought of a general 
confederation or absolute independence ever entered 
into their minds. As they grew rich w T e tried to in- 
terfere with their manufactures and monopolize their 
trade. It was unjust and it was foolish. The proof 
of its folly is the noble trade that has sprung up 
between us since our government lost all power of 
checking the course of nature. But this was the in- 
justice and the folly of the time. No such excuse can 
be made for the attempt to tax the colonies, — in de- 
fiance of the first principles of English government, — 
begun by narrow-minded incompetence and continued 
by insensate pride. It is miserable to see what true 
affection was there flung away. Persecuted and ex- 
cited, the founders of New England, says one of their 
historians, did not cry Farewell Rome, Farewell Baby- 
lon ! They cried, Farewell dear England ! And this 
was their spirit even far into the fatal quarrel. " You 
have been told," they said to the British Parliament, 



30 



after the subversion of the chartered liberties of Mas- 
sachusetts, " you have been told that we are seditious, 
impatient of government, and desirous of independ- 
ence. Be assured that these are not facts, but ca- 
lumnies. . Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and 
we shall ever esteem a union with you to be our 
greatest glory and our greatest happiness ; we shall 
ever be ready to contribute all in our power to the 
welfare of the whole empire ; we shall consider your 
enemies as our enemies, and your interest as our own. 
But if you are determined that your ministers shall 
wantonly sport with the rights of mankind ; if neither 
the voice of justice, the dictates of law, the principles 
of the constitution, nor the suggestions of humanity, 
can restrain your hands from shedding human blood in 
such an impious cause, we must then tell you that we 
will never submit to be ' hewers of wood and drawers 
of water' for any nation in the world." What was 
this but the voice of those who framed the Petition 
of Right and the Great Charter ? Franklin alone, per- 
haps, of the leading Americans, by the dishonourable 
publication of an exasperating correspondence, which 
he had improperly obtained, shared with Grenville, 
Townshend, and Lord North the guilt of bringing 
this great disaster on the English race. There could 
be but one issue to a war in which England was fight- 
ing against her better self, or rather in which England 
fought on one side and a corrupt ministry and parlia- 
ment on the other. The parliament of that day was 
not national ; and though the nation was excited by 
the war when once commenced, it by no means fol- 
lows that a national parliament would have com- 
menced it. The great national leader rejoiced that 
the Americans had resisted. But disease, or that 



31 



worse enemy which hovers so close to genius, deprived 
us of Chatham at the most critical hour. One thing 
there was in that civil war on which both sides may- 
look back with pride. In spite of deep provocation 
and intense bitterness, in spite of the unwarrantable 
employment of foreign troops and the infamous em- 
ployment of Indians on our side, and the exasperating 
interference of the French on the side of the Americans, 
the struggle was conducted on the whole with great 
humanity. Compared with the French Revolution, it 
was a contest between men of noble natures compared 
with a fight between infuriated beasts. Something, 
too, it is that from that struggle should have arisen 
the character of Washington, to teach all ages, and 
especially those which are inclined to worship vio- 
lence, the greatness of moderation and civil duty. It 
has been truly said, that there is one spectacle more 
grateful to Heaven than a good man in adversity — 
a good man successful in a great cause. Deeper happi- 
ness cannot be conceived than that of the years which 
Washington passed at Mount Vernon, looking back 
upon a life of arduous command held without a selfish 
thought, and laid down without a stain. 

The loss of the American colonies was perhaps, in 
itself, a gain to both countries. It was a gain as it 
emancipated commerce, and gave free course to those 
reciprocal streams of wealth which a restrictive policy 
had forbidden to flow. It was a gain as it put an end 
to an obsolete tutelage, which tended to prevent Ame- 
rica from learning betimes to walk alone, while it gave 
England only the puerile and somewhat dangerous 
pleasure of reigning over those whom she did not and 
could not govern, but whom she was tempted to harass 
and insult. A source of military strength colonies can 



32 



hardly be. You prevent them from forming proper 
military establishments of their own, and you drag 
them into your quarrels at the price of undertaking 
their defence. The inauguration of free trade was in 
fact the renunciation of the only solid object for which 
our ancestors clung to an invidious and perilous supre- 
macy, and exposed the heart of England by scattering 
her fleets and armies over the globe. It was not the 
loss of the colonies, but the quarrel, that was one of 
the greatest, perhaps the greatest, disaster that ever 
befell the English race. Who would not give up 
Blenheim and Waterloo, if only the two Englands 
could have parted from each other in kindness and in 
peace ; if our statesmen could have had the wisdom 
to say to the Americans generously and at the right 
season, "You are Englishmen like ourselves ; be, for 
your own happiness and our honour, like ourselves, 
a nation?" But English statesmen, with all their 
greatness, have seldom known how to anticipate ne- 
cessity ; too often the sentence of history on their 
policy has been that it was wise, just and generous, 
but "too late." Too often have they waited for the 
teaching of disaster. Time will heal this, like other 
wounds. In signing away his own empire over Ame- 
rica, George III. did not sign away the empire of Eng- 
lish liberty, of English law, of English literature, of 
English religion, of English blood, or of the English 
tongue. But though the wound will heal, and that it 
may heal ought to be the earnest desire of the whole 
English name, history can never cancel the fatal page 
which robs England of half the glory and half the 
happiness of being the mother of a great nation. 




Holiinger 
pH S.5 
Mill Run F03-2193 



